eCash (XEC): a complete guide to the coin and its mining

eCash is a proof of work network that grew out of the minority chain of the Bitcoin Cash split on 15 November 2020. The argument back then was not about block size, it was about money: the Bitcoin ABC client wanted part of the block reward to be diverted into a development fund by force, and most miners rejected that. The chain that accepted the diversion stayed in the minority and picked up the ticker BCHA.

On 1 July 2021 the project was renamed eCash with the ticker XEC. A redenomination came at the same time: 1 BCHA turned into 1,000,000 XEC, and the number of decimal places was cut from eight to two. Without that coefficient every numeric comparison on the page reads wrong: a reward of 3,125,000 XEC is exactly the same 3.125 coins of the old denomination that Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash pay out.

The main fact for a hardware owner is this, and there is no sense in hiding it: the miner receives only 58 percent of the block reward. Another 10 percent goes to Avalanche stakers, 16 percent to protocol development and 16 percent to the ecosystem. That is a direct deduction from profitability on the very same machines, and neither Bitcoin nor Bitcoin Cash has anything like it. The diversion that caused the split in the first place was not cancelled here, it was widened.

The page is built as a practitioner reference: how the reward split works, what the Avalanche layer adds on top of proof of work, why real time difficulty adjustment pulls income back to parity with Bitcoin, a ranking of current ASICs from our catalogue and a separate look at the figures that large aggregators and calculators publish in a distorted form.

• 2020The Bitcoin Cash split on 15 November. The cause was financial rather than technical: the Bitcoin ABC client demanded that 8 percent of the reward be diverted into a development fund, and roughly 82 percent of miners backed the alternative client. The ABC chain stayed in the minority and was listed by exchanges under the ticker BCHA.
• 2021The rebranding of 1 July: the project became eCash and the ticker changed to XEC. A redenomination of one to a million took place and the number of decimal places was cut from eight to two. A move to a hybrid model with Avalanche on top of proof of work was announced.
• 2022Avalanche Post-Consensus reached the main network on 14 September inside Bitcoin ABC 0.26.0. Nodes gained the ability to vote on blocks that had already been mined, which brought protection from reorganisations and one block finality. Exchanges were able to credit deposits after a single confirmation.
• 2023Staking rewards were switched on 15 November. From that moment 10 percent of the block reward goes to Avalanche stakers, the entry threshold is 100,000,000 XEC in a single unspent output, and the chance of winning is proportional to the size of the stake.
• 2024The halving in April at block 840,000: the full subsidy fell from 6,250,000 to 3,125,000 XEC and the miner share from 3,625,000 to 1,812,500 XEC. Annual supply inflation dropped to roughly 0.83 percent.
• 2024XEC was delisted by the OKX exchange on 6 June. Trading in part of the pairs stopped, the coin remained on smaller venues and liquidity narrowed noticeably.
• 2024The Heartbeat upgrade on 15 November: real time target adjustment was enabled. The network began raising difficulty whenever blocks arrive faster than the ten minute schedule, which removes the runs of very fast blocks that follow hashrate arriving and leaving.
• 2024In December the first results of real time adjustment were published: the spread of block times narrowed and the slumps that follow rented hashrate leaving became shorter.
• 2025Support for the ALP token standard was added to the protocol alongside the inherited SLP. By the end of the year the network counted more than 1,200 issued eTokens and over 350 collections of non fungible units.
• 2025Ecosystem launches: the XECX staking application, a fully reworked Cashtab wallet with the built in Agora decentralised exchange, the Local eCash marketplace with non custodial escrow and the PayButton plugin for WordPress.
• 2025Avalanche Pre-Consensus reached the main network on 15 November. A transaction gains finality within seconds, before it even enters a block, which removes the wait for confirmations in payment scenarios.
• 2026The network upgrade of 15 May, activated by the median time of the last eleven blocks. It brought no new protocol features but required nodes to move to branch 0.33: the first block after activation was 949,200.
• 2026On the first of July Firma was presented, a dollar stablecoin on eCash with no separate gas fee and no way for the issuer to freeze funds.
• 2026The project name landed in the news noise because of an unrelated event: a Bitcoin hard fork activating sidechains is scheduled for August 2026, and its authors called it eCash as well. It has nothing to do with the XEC network, yet some aggregators merged the two projects into a single card.

The accounting model is inherited from Bitcoin unchanged: the network stores no account balances, only a list of unspent outputs. A transaction references previous outputs, spends them and creates new ones, and the right to spend is proved by a signature. The only difference is how amounts are displayed: after the 2021 redenomination XEC has two decimal places, so the smallest indivisible unit is one hundredth of a coin.

Then comes the part that neighbouring chains do not have. A transaction goes not only into the common waiting pool but also to a vote among the nodes that hold a stake. The Avalanche mechanism polls a random sample of participants, repeats the poll and converges on a shared decision within a few rounds. Since November 2025 this works before a transaction enters a block too: the recipient sees the final status within seconds, without waiting for confirmation by work.

It is important to understand how the roles are divided, because this gets confused constantly. Blocks are still created by proof of work alone: miners grind through hashes, find a block, and that is how the entire emission of the coin comes into being. Avalanche creates no blocks and issues no coins, it votes on a block that is already there and decides whether to accept it or reject it. Stakers do not replace miners, they check them.

From that follows a practical consequence for a hardware owner. A block that breaks the rules, including the real time target rule, can be rejected by a vote of the stakers even when its hash is formally valid. An attempt to rewrite recent chain history runs into the same vote: the nodes have already locked in their choice and will not accept a competing branch after the fact.

1. The wallet signs a transactionThe key owner builds a transfer to a CashAddr address with the ecash prefix and signs it. The private key never leaves the device.
2. Nodes vote through AvalancheStake holders poll each other with a random sample and converge on a decision within a few rounds. Since November 2025 a transaction gains final status in seconds, before it is included in a block.
3. The pool assembles a block templateThe operator picks transactions and hands the job out to the connected machines. The template must carry the outputs to stakers and to the funds: without them the block will fail validation.
4. The ASIC grinds through hashesThe hardware changes the service fields of the header and computes double SHA-256 until the result falls below the target. The machines are the same ones used on Bitcoin, no modification is needed.
5. The block is publishedThe first transaction creates a reward of 3,125,000 XEC and splits it immediately: 1,812,500 to the miner, 312,500 to stakers and 500,000 each to protocol development and to the ecosystem.
6. Nodes accept or reject the blockAvalanche votes on the block once it appears. The real time target is checked as well: a block found too quickly is rejected even if its hash formally fits.
7. Difficulty is corrected at onceASERT compares the actual block time with the scheduled one and moves the target immediately. On top of it runs the real time adjustment, which raises the bar during the interval between blocks.

SHA-256 is used here exactly as in Bitcoin: the function is applied twice to the 80 byte block header while the miner varies the service fields until the hash falls below the target. Neither the 2020 split nor the 2021 rebranding touched the function itself, so all hardware is fully compatible and switches between networks by changing a pool address.

The function needs no memory and consists of simple logical operations, which makes it easy to freeze into silicon. ASICs pushed graphics cards out long before eCash appeared. A modern machine delivers hundreds of terahashes at an efficiency of around 10 joules per terahash, a graphics card works at the level of tens of megahashes: the gap is measured in thousands of times, and no electricity tariff wins it back.

Mining XEC on a graphics card or a processor makes no sense under any assumptions. It is the same algorithm and the same competition with industrial hardware as on Bitcoin. Any service promising otherwise is selling a cloud contract or running numbers that do not exist in the network.

AsicBoost works here too: the technique saves part of the computation by reusing an intermediate state of the function, iterating over the bits of the header version field. The open variant is described in BIP-320, and since the eCash block header structure is shared with Bitcoin, a machine with such firmware keeps the gain on this network as well.

The strong side of the algorithm is the same: simple verification, a mature component base and an enormous installed fleet. The weak side of eCash is its own and it is more serious than for its neighbours on the algorithm. The network accounts for hundredths of a percent of total SHA-256 power, so its own defence by work is minimal. That is precisely the gap the Avalanche layer closes: without it a network of this size would be vulnerable, with it rewriting history runs into a vote of the stakers rather than into hashrate.

Full description of the SHA-256 algorithm →

The emission cap is 21,000,000,000,000 XEC, that is exactly 21 million coins in the denomination used before the 2021 redenomination. The halving schedule is inherited from Bitcoin: a cut in half every 210,000 blocks. On 1 August 2026 around 20.06 trillion XEC were in circulation, roughly 95.4 percent of the cap.

The April 2024 halving happened at block 840,000 and lowered the full subsidy from 6,250,000 to 3,125,000 XEC. Annual supply inflation has held at around 0.83 percent since then. The next halving is tied to block 1,050,000, expected in 2028, and the subsidy will fall to 1,562,500 XEC. The protocol has no coin burning and no plans to shrink the supply already issued: only the rate of issuance goes down.

Now the main reason to read this page before buying a machine. The block reward is split by force, at the level of network rules: 58 percent to the miner, 10 percent to Avalanche stakers, 16 percent to protocol development and 16 percent to growing the ecosystem. In coins at the current subsidy that is 1,812,500 XEC to the miner, 312,500 to stakers and 500,000 into each of the two funds. A pool cannot opt out of those outputs: nodes will not accept a block without them.

This is where the most common calculator reading error comes from. Specialist services show a reward of 1,812,500 XEC, and that is correct, because that is exactly what reaches the miner. But the figure cannot be plugged in as the full block subsidy and cannot be compared with the 3.125 coins of Bitcoin: the comparable value is 3,125,000 XEC, and the difference between the two numbers is the very 42 percent that passes the hardware owner by.

Fees as a source of miner income are absent here entirely. Block space is effectively unlimited, the network runs at a fraction of a percent of its capacity and a transfer fee sits at the level of fractions of a cent. Income has to be planned from the subsidy alone, and specifically from the part of it that reaches the miner.

The full table of SHA-256 models from our catalogue sorted by efficiency: eCash runs on exactly the same fleet of machines as Bitcoin, and no dedicated XEC hardware exists or ever will.

Browse miners in the catalogue →

The ranking follows real efficiency from the catalogue, and the break even thresholds are computed from revenue of around 32 dollars per petahash per day, which follows from the miner share of 1,812,500 XEC, a price near 0.0000069 dollars and a network hashrate around 55 PH/s on 1 August 2026.

Firmware does not distinguish between networks: the machine computes the same SHA-256, and where the result goes is decided by the pool line in the settings. Everything that applies to a Bitcoin fleet applies to eCash without reservations, and no reflashing is needed when switching coins.

The stock Bitmain build lets you start the machine and pick one of the preset modes, but it does not let you set voltage and frequency per board. There is no way to bring a specific unit to its own optimum that way, and chips even from one batch differ noticeably.

Third party builds solve that problem. Through HashCore Toolkit the supported Antminer S19 and S21 models take firmware with manual per chain frequency and voltage control, automatic mode selection and telemetry from every hash board. The developer fee is 2.8 percent.

The key feature of such builds is AsicBoost. It saves part of the SHA-256 work by reusing an intermediate state of the function: the bits of the header version field are iterated over, not just the service counter. The open variant is described in BIP-320 and works on eCash exactly as it does on Bitcoin, because the two networks share the block header structure.

On eCash the economic case for tuning is stronger than on neighbouring chains, and that should be taken literally. Fees add nothing to income here, and only 58 percent of the subsidy reaches the hardware owner. The only levers left are the price of a kilowatt hour and joules per terahash, so every percent shaved off by undervolting weighs more. The usual limits still apply: reflashing voids the warranty and wrong voltages degrade the boards, so work with a backup of the factory build and raise the changes gradually.

The technical entry barrier is low: any SHA-256 ASIC already running on Bitcoin will do. You need a wallet with a CashAddr address, an account on a pool that supports XEC and one line edited in the web interface of the machine. No special firmware, drivers or separate hardware are required.

In practice the list of pools here is shorter than on Bitcoin and changes more often. Before connecting it is worth checking that the chosen venue really submits blocks to the network rather than simply keeping XEC on a list for show. It also helps that some operators can move hashrate between SHA-256 networks automatically by current profitability: on eCash that is worth more than usual, because the profitable moment to enter is exactly a moment of desynchronisation.

The home scenario is closed off for the same reasons as on Bitcoin, only harder. An industrial air cooled machine runs at 75 decibels and above, works around the clock and needs its own line with a 16 to 32 ampere breaker. A heat flow of 3 to 4 kilowatts has to go somewhere. At a Spanish household tariff of around 0.15 euro per kilowatt hour, eCash revenue does not cover electricity on a single model in the catalogue.

The industrial scenario differs in tariff and in packing density. Water cooled and immersion models give the best joules per terahash but need a ready loop and a heat exchanger: the plumbing costs money and does not pay for itself on one machine. The real boundary runs at roughly 0.10 to 0.14 dollars per kilowatt hour depending on the model, and that already accounts for the 42 percent of the reward that never reaches you.

One scenario that neighbouring chains do not offer is combining mining with staking. The entry threshold is 100,000,000 XEC in a single unspent output, which at the price on 1 August 2026 is a modest sum of a few hundred dollars. Formally nothing stops you from accumulating what you mine up to the threshold and clawing back part of the 10 percent the network takes from the miner for the stakers, but that is a separate role with a separate requirement to keep a node online.

Income is calculated from four quantities: machine hashrate, network difficulty, coin price and fees. For eCash the last term can safely be treated as zero, and the first three have to be multiplied by 0.58. No settings, pool or firmware cancel that multiplier: the outputs to stakers and funds are written into the rules and checked by nodes.

A useful shorthand is revenue per petahash per day. From the miner share of 1,812,500 XEC, a price near 0.0000069 dollars and the network hashrate you get roughly 26 to 43 dollars per PH/s per day, with a central estimate around 32. The spread is wide precisely because the eCash hashrate swings by multiples: capacity arrives and leaves following profitability. For comparison, Bitcoin was paying around 32 dollars per petahash on the same days.

Hence the main and deliberately dull conclusion: eCash carries no lasting premium over Bitcoin. Average profitability on one and the same ASIC hovers around parity, and that is not a coincidence but a consequence of how the network is built. The moment XEC becomes more profitable, rented capacity shows up, real time target adjustment tightens the bar immediately and the premium closes within hours rather than in the two weeks it would take with periodic recalculation. Entering the network only makes sense during moments of desynchronisation, and catching those by hand is close to impossible.

The second factor, which on a coin this thin weighs more than the calculated income, is liquidity. Daily turnover is measured in a couple of tens of millions of dollars against a capitalisation of a hundred million and change, and some large venues have already pulled the coin from trading. Selling a noticeable amount of what you mine moves the price, and a badly chosen exchange adds a risk that is absent when working with Bitcoin.

Open the profitability calculator →

One eCash specific point concerns staking: to take part in the Avalanche vote and claim that 10 percent of the reward you need a proof of stake ownership, signed by the key of an unspent output of 100,000,000 XEC or more. Electrum ABC can sign such proofs together with a Trezor, so the staker role does not require keeping keys on a hot machine.

When moving funds, remember the 2021 redenomination. Old addresses and old amounts in BCHA denomination do not convert to current ones automatically in your head: one coin of the old denomination is 1,000,000 XEC, and the present format has only two decimal places. The wallet recalculates everything itself, but a six order of magnitude error creeps in very easily when reconciling balances by hand against old records.

Nobody buys hardware specifically for eCash: any SHA-256 ASIC from our catalogue works here as well, so the choice of machine comes down to the same criteria as for Bitcoin. This is a rare case where the decision about the coin is completely detached from the decision about the iron and changes with one line in the pool settings.

The coin itself trades on Binance, including pairs against national currencies, and also on MEXC, CoinEx, Gate and Bitget. Liquidity is noticeably thinner than for its neighbours on the algorithm: daily turnover is measured in a couple of tens of millions of dollars. The shrinking list of venues deserves a separate note: OKX removed XEC from trading on 6 June 2024 and Bitfinex delisted it too. Kraken meanwhile still keeps an XEC price page even though the coin cannot be bought on that exchange, which misleads people regularly.

The practical rule for a miner is simple: do not leave what you mine on an exchange any longer than a specific trade requires. The network gives finality in seconds, so withdrawing to your own wallet creates no delay, while venue risk on a coin of this size is above average. Staking requires holding coins in an unspent output under your own key, so an exchange balance is unsuitable for that role in principle.

The application layer on eCash is developed noticeably further than you would expect from a coin of this size. Two token standards run in the network: the inherited SLP and the newer ALP added in 2025. By the end of that same year more than 1,200 issued eTokens and over 350 collections of non fungible units were in circulation, and token transfers cost the same fractions of a cent as ordinary transactions.

The most visible use case is stablecoins. In July 2026 Firma was presented, a dollar stablecoin with no separate gas fee and no way for the issuer to freeze funds. Earlier still, eCash carried the launch of TUSDT, a stablecoin of the government of the Northern Mariana Islands, presented as the first issue of its kind by a public body in the United States. For a network with a capitalisation of a hundred million and change, that is an unusually high bar of institutional use.

The payments side is built around fast finality. The PayButton plugin embeds XEC acceptance into WordPress sites, the Local eCash marketplace offers non custodial person to person exchange with escrow, and the Agora exchange built into Cashtab lets you swap tokens straight from the wallet. There is also the optional CashFusion protocol for non custodial transaction mixing, inherited from the code base shared with Bitcoin Cash. Among services accepting XEC the project names gaming venues and car sales.

For a miner all of this matters in exactly one respect: activity on the application layer does not translate into income. Fees in this network are so small and block space so abundant that even a multiple increase in transaction count would not change block revenue in any noticeable way. Counting on eToken growth to lift mining profitability is not advisable.

The honest way to talk about the security of this network is as follows. The defence eCash gets from its own proof of work is minimal: the network accounts for hundredths of a percent of total SHA-256 power, and capacity sufficient for an attack is nothing remarkable on the scale of the Bitcoin market. We will not quote dollar estimates for the cost of an attack, because public calculators of that kind differ by multiples on coins this size, and misleading the reader with a figure that merely looks precise is worse than giving a qualitative assessment.

The caveat here is fundamental, and without it the picture is wrong. Since 14 September 2022 an Avalanche layer has run on top of the work: nodes holding a stake vote on a block that has already been found and decide whether to accept it. The classic attack that rewrites recent history runs not into accumulated work but into that vote: the nodes have locked in their choice and will not accept a competing branch after the fact. That is precisely why a network with such a small share of hashrate exists at all instead of being wiped out in its first month.

Since 15 November 2025 a pre consensus has been added that gives a transaction final status within seconds, before it enters a block. For a payment recipient that means a double spend is closed off by the vote before a competing block can appear. It is worth repeating the general rule that holds for any proof of work network: a majority attack does not allow stealing other people coins or creating extra ones, the most it can do is reverse the attacker own recent transactions.

The flip side of this design is concentration. There is one reference implementation here, Bitcoin ABC, the network has no alternative build of comparable weight, and the whole Avalanche voting code base was written by a single team. We found no reliable public data on the number of reachable nodes or on stake distribution, and we will not quote any. When planning fleet operations more than a year ahead it is sensible to account for the fact that upgrade predictability here is high, since they ship on 15 May and 15 November, but so is dependence on a single developer.

The August Bitcoin hard fork is passed off as an eCash event. A Bitcoin fork that activates sidechains and airdrops a new coin to BTC holders one for one is scheduled for August 2026. Its authors independently took the same name, eCash. It has nothing to do with the XEC network: a different chain, a different team, a different asset. Even so, one of the largest market aggregators was serving that fork in the news block of the XEC card on 1 August 2026 as an event of the coin itself. The coincidence is made worse by the fact that the eCash chain height approaches the same values in roughly the same weeks.

The block reward is written as 6.25 XEC. A scaling error of about half a million times, and it appears not on a forum but in a specialist mining reference. The correct numbers are these: the full subsidy is 3,125,000 XEC and the miner share is 1,812,500 XEC. Feeding 6.25 into a calculator gives you an income with no relation to reality.

The miner share is taken for the full reward. Calculators and pools show 1,812,500 XEC, and that is right, because that is exactly what reaches the miner. But the figure cannot be compared with the 3.125 coins of Bitcoin: the comparable value is the full subsidy of 3,125,000 XEC. The difference between the two numbers is the 42 percent that goes to stakers and funds.

The official mining page quotes pre halving figures. On the project site the minimum amounts of the mandatory block outputs are given as 200,000,327 and 62,500,102 satoshis. Those values were computed from the old subsidy of 6,250,000 XEC and are twice as large as reality after the April 2024 halving. Even a primary source does not always update its own figures, so check them against actual blocks.

BCHA and XEC are presented as separate assets. Some reference sites still keep a separate BCHA card with 2021 prices. There has been no separate BCHA asset since 1 July 2021: it is the very same chain renamed to eCash, with a one to a million conversion and two decimal places instead of eight. Old BCHA quotes cannot be lined up against current XEC quotes directly.

The coin is called Bitcoin ABC. Since July 2021 Bitcoin ABC has been only the name of the node implementation, currently branch 0.33. The coin itself is called eCash, ticker XEC. Reference sites that write about a Bitcoin ABC coin are describing the state of five years ago and almost always carry outdated network parameters along with it.

The reward split is described without stakers. A scheme without the staker share went out of date on 15 November 2023. The current split is this: 58 percent to the miner, 10 percent to Avalanche stakers, 16 percent to protocol development and 16 percent to the ecosystem. An even more ancient variant also circulates in which the miner gets all 100 percent: it never matched the network, because the fund diversion was the very cause of the 2020 split.

Pool shares are computed from a single tracker. On 1 August 2026 a public pool aggregator showed about 3 PH/s across the venues connected to it, while network summaries gave 42 to 70 PH/s. A tracker sees only the pools it polls itself, and shares cannot be computed from such a sample. Claims that half the eCash network belongs to one pool are built on exactly this substitution.

People point to an exchange where the coin does not trade. Kraken runs an XEC price page and turns up in search results even though the coin does not trade on that exchange. The situation is similar with venues that ran a delisting: OKX removed XEC on 6 June 2024 and Bitfinex delisted it as well. The existence of a quote page does not mean the existence of a market.

Avalanche is described as a replacement for mining. Phrasings along the lines of eCash moved to proof of stake are wrong. Blocks are created by proof of work alone, the entire emission of the coin arises through mining, and Avalanche votes on blocks and transactions that already exist. Stakers create no blocks and do not replace miners, they receive their 10 percent for taking part in the vote.

People promise that eCash is more profitable to mine than Bitcoin. On the same hardware profitability hovers around parity, and once the trimmed miner share is taken into account eCash has no structural advantage at all. Real time target adjustment, running since 15 November 2024, closes any deviation within hours: the moment the network becomes more profitable, rented capacity arrives and the bar goes up immediately.

An exact dollar cost of a 51 percent attack is quoted. On coins of this size open calculators differ by multiples, because there is almost no rentable hashrate for XEC and nothing to feed into the formula. A qualitative assessment is more honest: the defence the network gets from its own work is minimal, and what protects it from history being rewritten is the Avalanche vote, running since September 2022.